Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

5/21/13

The Curious Case of the Benjamin Button Jelly Fish

Is immortality worth it? What if you could turn off the aging clock? You see your loved ones die around you as you keep your fresh face. Or, is there another way to look at all this?
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 story "The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button," a life is lived backwards, coming into the world as an old man moving through time to infancy and death. After being born, the grey, wrinkled offspring turns to his youngish father, who tells him babies always have blankets. “ 'See here,' the old man announced suddenly, 'if you think I’m going to walk home in this blanket, you’re entirely mistaken.' "

Near the end of his life, in kindergarten, Benjamin recalls "the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill, the first years of his marriage." All that had "faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been."

Here is a Kafkaesque story, one bizarre, even grotesque but, unlike Kafka, with a sense of humor.
In Fitzgerald's story, time's arrow is not reversed, only biology's. Entropy and The Second Law of Thermodynamics still apply, despite the mathematics of physics, which indicate time can flow either direction. Whether it can or cannot, we experience it in only one direction.

Immortality is a separate issue and philosophers come down on either side of it, some wanting it, others declining it. Those who decline, claim endless life would be boring, wearying, despite even robust health. Those who want it think in terms of pleasures spread out over time so as not to satiate--meditation, listening to beautiful music, sexual intercourse, enjoying a gourmet meal.

As for longevity, it has been increasing. In 1786, average life expectancy was 24 years. In 1886 it doubled to 48. Right now a newborn can expect to live an average of 76 years. Jeanne Calment, a French woman, died in 1997 at 122. She recalled Van Gogh as a scruffy, disheveled man with dirty fingernails when he came into the family store.

Immortality may soon be at hand for those who can afford paying a DNA entrepreneur for it.The cause of aging is now becoming understood. Telomeres, molecular chains, are key in the process. The length of telomere chains becomes shorter as we grow older, becoming so short that cells cannot reproduce or, if they do, lethal errors occur.

When reproduction ceases, or as the DNA code is lost through errors, the Hayflick limit is reached. When you think of death, think of reaching the Hayflick limit. Born in 1928, Leonard Hayflick, its discoverer, is still waiting to reach his limit.

Turritopsis dohrnii ignores Hayflick and starts over when its limit is reached. Some call it the Benjamin Button Jelly Fish.

It was discovered by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. In Portofino on the Italian Riviera, a place where you might want to live forever, Sommer was snorkeling when he spotted an interesting creature and took it back to his lab.

As he observed it, he noticed bizarre behavior. It refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing younger until it became a polyp, at which point it began its life cycle anew.

This was as bizarre as Benjamin Button. It changed from old, growing younger until it was again a fetus. Then it began again in an ongoing cycle of aging and rejuvenation. This occurs, though, only under environmental stress or physical assault. Contrarily, we humans can be aged by stress and assault. More

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John